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2017 Fourthwall Books Photobook Award

April 27, 2017

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Fourthwall Books has announced Rahima Gambo as the winner of the 2017 Fourthwall Books Photobook Award. This award was created in 2015 and is given each year to an African photographer to promote photography and photobooks in Africa. The winner, selected from a list of candidates nominated by experts across the continent, will work with Fourthwall Books to create a photobook in an edition of 500.

The project selected for the award is entitled Education is Forbidden and considers the situation of students at schools and universities in north-eastern Nigeria in the context of the Boko Haram insurgency. It begins on the campus of Adamawa State University in the wake of an attack in October 2014. The terrible disruption of this event speaks to the state of education in some parts of Nigeria, the complex narrative of religious fundamentalism in the north of the country, and the status of girls and women in society. Education is Forbidden is a layered and deeply considered engagement with important social, historical and political issues that inform and influence other countries in the region, and that have far-reaching consequences beyond the continent.

Rahima Gambo, born 1986, is a Nigerian documentary photographer and visual artist who lives and works in Abuja, Nigeria. She holds a masters from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, gender and social policy from the London School of Economics and a bachelor degree in development studies from the University of Manchester. Gambo’s long-term projects focus on Nigerian identity, gender, memory, history and the social construction of womanhood in northern Nigeria. She has exhibited at the Nlele Institute Lagos Open Range and at the 2015 Bamako Biennale. She was a 2014 Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund Fellow and in 2015, was awarded a grant by the International Women’s Media Foundation-Howard G. Buffet Fund. Gambo’s images can be seen in the New York Times, Leadership Newspaper Nigeria, the Nation Newspaper, Interview Magazine, Quartz Africa, Journ Africa, Forskning and Framsteg, and Modern Filosofi Magazine Sweden.